Attentional Overload And Writing Performance: Effects Of Rough Draft And Outline Strategies

Abstract

Preparing a written outline during prewriting and composing a rough first draft are strategies that may ease attentional overload and consequently enhance writing performance. The present research examined how these strategies affect the efficiency of the writing process and the quality of the written product. The processing time and cognitive effort given to planning ideas, translating ideas into text, and reviewing ideas and text were monitored by using directed retrospection and comparing secondary-task reaction times. These measures indicated whether strategies controlled attention allocation in a way that alleviated attentional overload. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that preparing a written outline, compared with not doing so, led to higher quality documents as indexed by ratings of judges. Composing a rough draft, as opposed to a polished draft, had no beneficial effect on writing quality. The findings of Experiment 2 showed that a mental outline improved the quality of the documents as much as a written outline, indicating that the written outline was not serving as an external memory aid. Also, both mental and written outlines eased attentional overload by allowing the writer to focus processing time, though not cognitive effort, on the single process of translating ideas into text.

Department(s)

Psychological Science

International Standard Serial Number (ISSN)

0278-7393

Document Type

Article - Journal

Document Version

Citation

File Type

text

Language(s)

English

Rights

© 2023 American Psychological Association, All rights reserved.

Publication Date

01 Jan 1988

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